One of the startups in the current YC cycle is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet. If there are any Excel power users here, could you please describe anything you'd like to be able to do that you can't currently? Your reward could be to have some very smart programmers working to solve your problem.
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
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Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#2Queries.
Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#3Excel is actually a reasonably complete program. That said, I would like to be able to:
1. Build predictive models from data I've entered in Excel. I find myself exporting from Excel into R a lot to satisfy this need. Microsoft partially addresses this need with the Data Mining Add-ons for Excel.
2. Have more than ~1 million rows (which is Excel 2007's limit).
3. More easily clean up data in a large spreadsheet.
4. Reversibly anonymize data -- if I download some logs with usernames or IPs, I don't want those in my analysis (I just hide those columns), but I do need to have a unique identifier for each row. And later get the names back if I want.
And a couple things I think Excel is great at already:
1. Making data look pretty. The charts are great, and there's (http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/defaul...) for non-power users.
2. Making data easily portable.
3. Filtering/sorting data -- VLOOKUP has saved the day so many times.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#4Is it aimed at any particular domain? Finance folks pretty much live in excel, they might make a good use-case on what can't be done or what they don't like in excel.
Slides 4 & 5 give some insight: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2191289/yaron-minskycufp-2006
While I am not a big user of excel, the google docs version of excel is very similar to the desktop version + collaboration (think Oddpost). The other approach taken by some people I have spoken with is viewing it more as data and tying to do more (think gmail to some extent).
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#5[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#665,000.
(that's the maximum number of rows in Excel before 2007). I'd like something similar to SPSS, which is more convenient for tables with lots of rows and separates the data from the formulae.
A tool for working with streaming data.
Also, charting that works for large amounts data. Try having Excel chart 65,000 rows and you'll have time to make coffee while you wait. There are no ways to zoom or analyze Excel charts, either.
In fact, charting for data analysis alone is a big enough problem that needs solving (and you won't have to do all that catching up with Excel). Short of using HTML/Flash or .NET/Java components, there is nothing an enterprise worker can use. Get access to a Bloomberg terminal from somewhere and play with its charts to see what I mean.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#7This minor, but:
A round() function that isn't stupid, i.e. it rounds to a certain number of significant figures, rather than relative to the decimal point. Workarounds exist, but I want a no-work-around.
I suppose it's not a problem worthy of very smart programmers, but it still makes me wish for bullets-over-SMTP.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#8Export to quote-qualified CSV.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#9Automatic versioning and version control.
Re: Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
#10Queries. Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways.
Just the ability to represent one-to-many relationships in a native way (without resorting to hiding rows or the like) would be a huge step in that direction. The goal could be: make Excel handle more of the borderline cases where you really should be using a simple database, but all you know is Excel.